Hello again everyone. Summer is indeed here if you haven't noticed from the sweltering humidity and afternoon thundershowers if you live in or are visiting the Sunshine State. For many of us, that includes taking vacations to here, there, and everywhere, which is much welcome after last summer dealing with COVID. But now that people are vaccinated (more on that later), we're finally starting to see life get somewhat back to normal. No, this pandemic is not yet over by any means, but at least we're no longer cooped up in our homes like last spring and summer.
Included with life getting back to where it was in 2019, comes the announcement that fireworks will be returning to Orlando's Lake Eola for Independence Day I have been to this event twice before, in 1998 (which was delayed because of wildfires) and in 2016, and found both occasions to be enjoyable. So, in my mind, I began to make tentative plans to go to Orlando for the 4th. However, that might be problematic.
For starters, I have to rely on public transportation to get around. That means to get to Orlando to begin with, I'd have to take a Greyhound Bus, and from Spring Hill, I would have to take this route:
That's right, I would have to travel to Atlanta to get to Orlando. So, I'd be better off taking the bus to Tampa, then go to Orlando from there. In a later blog post, I'll go more into the shortcomings of our so-called regional transit system.
Then there's the matter of getting to DTO from the Greyhound station, which is as usual not in the best part of town. I could take the bus to the downtown Lynx (Orlando's regional transit system) terminal and hoof it to Lake Eola from there, but then there's the matter of getting back to begin with.
THEN I have to face my BIGGEST obstacle as far as going anywhere, and that's my own family. For those who don't know yet, I live with two of my three sisters (the other one is in NC), they are both boomers, and are staunch conservatives; i.e. they more likely than not believe in "the Big Lie" than not. That being said, neither of them believe in the COVID vaccine, and refuse to take it. On top of that, they believe that the COVID vaccine has a weakened strain of the COVID virus, so much so that they refuse to allow me to get vaccinated. You read that right, they are so damned paranoid that they won't let me get vaccinated. 😒
There is a lot to say about my relationship with my sisters, the oldest one especially. When I wanted to take a trip to St. Louis two years ago to visit a friend, she came up with excuse after excuse to not want me to go, until finally permitting me to do so five months after the fact, and even then she wanted to chaperone me. A forty-seven year old man, even a stroke survivor, does not need to have his meddling older sister around him all the flipping time. But, I should save that for yet another blog post later on.
So in conclusion, I guess any and all plans I have for this summer are indeed temporary at best.
UPDATE:
In my last entry I pondered the question what happened to Mary Armantrout, the former anchor at WESH TV in Orlando who I think was the first host of their "Midday" program in the early 1980s. Turns out that I couldn't find out more about her, so I guess she left whatever role she had in front of the camera and was strictly in a production or she left the industry altogether. Who knows?
CT
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